How can I not be frightened? Let me explain.

Listen to this post:

I see They are at it again. I take a quick peek at social media, and an old friend is shouting from afar, to anyone who will listen, “How can you see what They are doing and not be frightened?” My answer is that They are doing Their best to scare us.

Whoever They are, it’s a given that They are up to no good. We have known each other for a long time and made fond long-ago memories together, and now here They are to destroy everything that made those memories possible. They are insidious in every way, and how could we not be frightened?

My question is: Why do They want us to be scared of each other? Who benefits when we are at each other’s throats and frightened to risk living in peace and love with one another? Can we stop long enough to see through this induced hatred and fear and reach out to understand each other?

Rage and fear take a lot of energy, and if we give it a rest, we might find peace in our hearts. Peace is not an absence; it is a fullness. Peace is the default. When we are not quarreling and throwing epithets and stones and bullets at each other, we are buying and selling, and talking and sharing, and playing and working together. Only when the agitators and activists hurl their insults and their anger into the center of things, only then is the peace disturbed. The raging ones have been at it for so long that we forget peace is the default, and we forget that we have more in common than differences. They — whoever They are, and They come at us from all sides — exploit our differences to drive a wedge.

In the fullness of peace is a calm, gentle, patient, kind reality. If there is true fear anywhere, it is the fear in the hearts of these agitators that they might lose control of their narratives and we will stop being afraid of each other.

“How can I not be frightened?” Oh, sometimes I am frightened, because I can see the fear that grows when these manufacturers of fear relentlessly bang the drum that demands we be terrified of The Other. You know the word for those who want us afraid, don’t you? Terrorist. I am wary of those who worship at this altar of Fear and Rage and Anger, but if I yield to the impulse to be terrified, then the terrorists have won and they will rule the day.

No, my choice every morning and, as much as I can manage, every moment, is to love and live in peace with everyone I meet. When we find ourselves at the precipice and about to jump into the pit of fear and rage, let us talk each other down from the ledge and seek understanding in a spirit of love. Let us love and laugh and reason together until the fear mongers give up in frustration.

Each day has enough trouble

I page through my journal looking for encouraging words to share here, but I find I’ve spent a lot of time worrying lately.

The funny thing is I wrote a book called Refuse to be Afraid, and here I’ve been — perhaps afraid is the wrong word, but I definitely needed to read my own book, the one packed with quotes like Tom Petty’s immortal observation, “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

I got so anxious that I wrote, in big letters, Jesus’ gentle chastisement, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” and then copied from my favorite passage in Matthew —

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

And wouldn’t you know it, God and God’s people came to my rescue to ensure that what I was worried about didn’t happen anyway. Someday, when I can put my gratitude into proper words, I will tell that story, but for now I remain overwhelmed.

There is always a path through the storm; there is always a sunrise after the dark. Sometimes the path is as simple as humbling yourself and admitting, “I need help.”

Words have meaning

There is another side to H.L. Mencken’s wonderful quote that I often cite — “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary” — and that is that some of the hobgoblins are real, not imaginary. And most of those, of course, are practical politicians.

There’s another side to Tom Petty’s wonderful quote I use all the time — “Most things I worry about never happen anyway” — and that is that some things I worry about do happen sometimes.

Zig Ziglar said that when his guy did not win the presidency, he would give himself 24 hours to feel miserable, and then he would pick himself up, dust himself off, and say, “Well, this man is my president.”

Consider this my 24 hours.

A man who fantasized publicly about putting bullets into a political adversary and his children was elected attorney general of Virginia on Tuesday, as was a liar who promised a socialist utopia in New York City.

Words have a way of frightening me, because I think scary people choose their words carefully. The words the Third Reich employed were especially frightening, because they hypnotized otherwise reasonable people into condoning unspeakable horrors.

I have never said out loud or written down how uncomfortable I am about the agency named Homeland Security, because its name scares me. The word Homeland in that context is too similar for my tastes to “Fatherland,” the Reich’s appellation for Germany.

Similarly, I wonder why anyone would embrace a label like “democratic socialist” as if that was a good thing to be. The phrase is too close to “national socialist” not to give me pause. It was the national socialists of Germany who wreaked such havoc in the 1930s and 1940s. No nation should aspire to go there again. The greatest horrors of the 20th century arose from the embrace of socialism and its cousin, communism, but it seems that time has taken the edge off that terror and made those terms acceptable in civilized company again.

These thoughts are off-brand for a guy who wrote a book called Refuse to be Afraid, but I must admit I am afraid of history repeating itself as Powers That Be work to make our Fatherland secure and national socialists draw huge crowds. It will be different this time, the socialists promise. They always make that promise, history shows, and just like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, once in power they yank the promise away to reveal their true nature. Perhaps those mesmerized by socialist promises are even too young to know who Lucy and Charlie Brown are, and they need instead to hear the old fable about the scorpion who hitched a ride across the river.

Of course, the point of Refuse to be Afraid was not that fear isn’t real or that there is nothing to be afraid of; the point was that we should not let our fear control our actions. And so I’m giving myself these 24 hours to fret — taking no action except to write down these thoughts — and tomorrow I’ll pick myself up and dust myself off. My only solace is that that man is not attorney general of my state and that man is not the mayor of any city near me — yet.